Hah, that's an interesting point. How exactly do you expect to get people to change their attitude?
I don't own a home and I've spent a nontrivial amount of my net worth paying rent in HCOL areas, including the Bay Area. Renters want prices to go down. Homeowners want prices to go up. And the world is round.
Perhaps some legislation and removal of zoning restrictions would help.
> How exactly do you expect to get people to change their attitude?
That is indeed the question. The people who stand to gain from a HCOL area being HCOL are almost certainly not going to do so on their own. Which brings us to...
> Perhaps some legislation and removal of zoning restrictions would help.
Perhaps. And luckily, renters typically outnumber landlords in these areas, so you'd think that'd be a slam dunk, but then said areas end up with milquetoast approaches like rent control instead of actually addressing the issue of land value speculation driving up rent.
My preferred solution would be to pull a Henry George and institute a land value tax, with the revenues going directly into a UBI program. This would readily stifle the idea of "investing" in land (since it'd be a waste of money to pay LVT on land you ain't using), while not stifling any incentives to develop on that land (since only the land itself would be taxed, rather than the improvements on it).
And then yeah, zoning restrictions need to get chopped down by quite a bit.
I don't own a home and I've spent a nontrivial amount of my net worth paying rent in HCOL areas, including the Bay Area. Renters want prices to go down. Homeowners want prices to go up. And the world is round.
Perhaps some legislation and removal of zoning restrictions would help.